Over the years, I’ve dabbled on and off with OU-XML, the XML document format that OU and OpenLearn texts are mastered in. Over the last year I’ve been exploring convertng OU-XML to the simple markdown text format (eg here).
There are a several advantages to using markdown: firstly, it’s a simple text format; secondly, you can open and edit markdown docs in a Jupyter notebook UI via Jupytext; thirdly, there are well proven (though still fiddly…) workflows for publising websites from markdown source docs (eg on of my experiments here).
As to why editing markdown docs in a notebook UI is useful: for one, you can edit — and preview — Latex, which means you can write maths equations and chemical formulae in a simple text way; for another, you can add code into your document that can embed interactives: for example, my folium magic lets you embed maps with markers or shaperfiles in to the document with a single, relatively straightforward, one-liner; or code to generate charts from data; or create simple interactive applications using ipywidgets. And so on. In short, the notebook is a medium that affords you lots of possibilities for incorporating generated, as well as interactive, content.
Following a proviocation by Marco Kalz / @mkalz yesterday, I cobbled together various bits of code into this repo — innovationOUtside/open-ouxml-tools — which doubles as the src for an installable Python package’n’CLI, that lets you:
- download and grab the OU-XML for an OpenLearn unit, along with all its image assets, into a SQLite database;
- generate a set of markdown files from the SQLite database.
With the single test unit I tried it on, it seems to work okay in MyBinder (just click on the button on the repo homepage, than click on the README.md file when the notebook UI loads).
To get the files out, the nbarchive extension is preinstalled into the Binderised environment so you should be able to zip and export the all the generated files.
They could then be uploaded into a clone of something like ouseful-template-repos/oer-md-publish for autopublishing. (That example uses CircleCI as per this). I’ll try to figure out a Github Action way of doing something similar over the next few days, perhaps in a repo that will also grab a specified OpenLEarn unit for you (eg by using a Git commit performative CLI call, for example…?!;-)
Note that I’m still not claiming that this is easy, but I think the pieces are there if anyone wants to work through it and try it out. If folk do play with it, I’m more likely to try to make it a bit easier. But I know that because it isn’t easy, most folk won’t try it. (S’like a built in defense mechanism for me; matched time. If no-one else bothers, I don’t have to either… So if you want this thing to become real, you have to invest time into it now, too…)
PS I’m working on a new way of introducing recipes like this, as TINEWY (tin yui) ones: There Is No Easy Way Yet.
OUseful.Info, the blog... 